Kevin Mullan

Published:09:24Updated:09:40Wednesday 21 February 2018

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Derry motivational speaker, Paula Clarke, has been lined up by the Institute of Directors to talk about the importance of emotional intelligence at its Women’s Leadership Conference 2018 in Belfast on March 9.

Ms. Clarke of Galway-based consultancy, Clarke Griffin Associates, has been asked to take part in a ‘Language of leadership and Emotional Intelligence’ panel discussion in the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

The former Thornhill College pupil has been billed by the IoD as a “licensed practitioner for Insights Discovery, a Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) practitioner, an Executive Coach, and a qualified practitioner for Six Seconds, (a global organisation specialising in the assessment of emotional intelligence /EI).”

During a recent TEDx talk in Galway entitled ‘Your Forensic Mirror: Applying Emotional Intelligence To Achieve Success,’ she spoke of how her formative years in war-torn Derry helped shape her personal philosophy.

Describing the negotiation of a militarised city centre as a teenager, she recalled, “big hulks of buildings that blocked your view of where you were going. As I approached it, I could hear the click, click, click of the turnstiles. Sometimes turnstiles are a good thing to hear because you are going into ‘Croker’ to see your team or going into a concert. Not these turnstiles.”

She said her fear of the soldiers dissipated following a personal epiphany and that she would approach the sangers with “shoulders back, head-up, defiant, staring the soldier in the eye, giving what my mother would call lip and I’m good at lip.”

She said she now lives by Auschwitz survivor, Viktor Emil Frankl’s maxim, that “anything can be taken from a person, except one thing, the last of the human freedoms, and that is your choice to choose your attitude”.